Quotes from Russell Banks

Abbott says, 'Biggest...difference...between...people...is...quality...of...attention.' And since a person's quality of attention is one of the few things about her that a human can control, then she better damn well do it, say I. Put that together with the Golden Rule in a nutshell, and you've got my philosophy of life. Abbott's too. And you don't need religion for that.

But I understood Bear Otto's desire to become a noble man, a man like Billy Ansel, and I respected that, naturally. I just wished the boy had more ways of imagining the thing than by becoming a good soldier. But that's boys, I guess.

it is when a white person resists the privilege of turning colorless that he frees himself, at least partially from the sickness of racialism.

It's funny about religion, whether it's the religion of white Rasta kids or even my own mom it's usually got some other point than thanks and praise. For the people doing the thanking and praising, I mean.

Just to show you how far I was from predicting the accident or suspecting that it could occur-even though, except for Dolores Driscoll, who drove the bus, I was surely the person in town closest to the event, the only eyewitness, you might say-at the moment it occurred I was thinking of fucking Risa Walker.

She was like a stranger to me then, a stranger whose life had just been made utterly meaningless. I know this because I felt the same way. Meaning had gone wholly and and in one clot right out of my life too, and as result I'm sure I was like a stranger to her as well. Our individual pain was so great that that we could not recognize any other.

Let the soil here below stink and turn to a scarlet muck, and let us crawl through it until our mouths and nostrils fill with it and we drown in it with our hands on each other's throats—I no longer resist this war. I relish it.

Before you lose your children, you can talk about it-as a possibility, I mean [...] But when the thing that you only imagined actually happens, you quickly discover that you can barely speak of it. Your story is jumbled and mumbled, out of sync and unfocused. At least that's how it has been for me.

Which is like writing history backward, if you ask me, fixing the past to fit the present. Hindsight made over into foresight.

If you dedicate your attention to discipline in your life you become smarter.

Although I still occasionally paint and draw, my life has now been shaped by my writing.

If you are born black, it is better to be born now than in any other time in United States history. My grandson is black. His life is a different life than if he had been born when I was born.

My major allegiance has been to storytelling, not to history.

I much prefer working with kids whose life could be completely upended by a reading of a book over a weekend. You give them a book to read - they go home and come back a changed person. And that is so much more interesting and exciting.

Go, my book, and help destroy the world as it is.

Loyalty is weird, it kicks in when you dont expect it and the people who deserve loyalty least seem to get it the most.

Lists of books we re-read and books we can't finish tell more about us than about the relative worth of the books themselves

If you dedicate your attention to discipline in your life you become smarter while you are writing than while you are hanging out with your pals or in any other line of work.

When you are a long way from where you think you belong, you will attach yourself to people you would otherwise ignore or even dislike.

One hates a person for the same reason one loves him 

All those happy, pretty, successful people- he hated them because he knew they didn't really exist, and he hated even more the magazine that glorified them and in a way that made them exist, actors, rock musicians, famous writers, politicians. Those aren't people, he fumed, they're photographs.

We are the planet, fully as much as water, earth, fire and air are the planet, and if the planet survives, it will only be through heroism. Not occasional heroism, a remarkable instance of it here and there, but constant heroism, systematic heroism, heroism as governing principle.

But when you're a kid it's like you're wearing these binoculars strapped to your eyes and you can't see anything except what's in the dead center of the lenses

Boys like it when you talk to them as if they were grown men—at least he always did when he was a kid—because they pretend that's what they are anyhow, grown-up men, and they do it for their entire lives.